Honestly, buy one used on eBay, give it a spin, sell it again if not happy. Things that worked: Scanning a trackball I own, create a snug fitting cover for the backpack. Scanning the charging port of my Audi, create an inset for snowy weather. Scan an ITX Mainboard and a PCIe card in it, create a frame that holds both and a fan. What did not work: Scan a small plastic cap with threads and all and replicate it. Anything that has deep grooves, holes, you name it. If it disappears within a 30° angle from a distance of 20cm, you’re likely not scanning it. Shiny surfaces need to be matted, either with isopropanol and talcum or some kindof special, sublimating scan spray. I usually use the thing for freeform stuff that is too aggravating to measure, but still measure dimensions that need to be exact. Yes, the software puts out a mesh of polygons in formats like STL. I usually load those into CAD and model around it.

Got mine, an Einstar Gen1 for about 1000€ two years ago. They are cheaper now, new.

Ever used one of them handheld 3D scanners that create huge point clouds and derive a mesh from them? Yeah, I regularly hit the ceiling at 64GB with bigger scans at high resolution.

The city will pay, not much else will happen.

The linked video by Real Engineering does some back of the napkin math and yeah… the numbers are so off anything remotely feasible, it’s hilarious.

They came out on top of 2008/09 as well.

Oh they see it coming as well, but unlike us, they have the levers and means to come out on top of it.

What they have is already done developing and they are flush in cash. A company that creates an ERP for a specialized industry does not care, unless a huge chunk of their customers demand a change all at once AND are ready to pay for it. I mean, I understand the idealism but this is just one of those “if everybody just…” situations that, imho, holds back open source solutions because their defendants look a bit excentric from established businesses’ points of view.

I’m reading all these comments and I guess no one here works outside of academia or 100% IT companies.

Reality out there is, that O365 is so deeply integrated with other business related software, that it’s never going away. My company uses an ERP system that has maybe 200 customers worldwide. It is highly specialized for what we do. There is zero financial incentive for the manufacturer to support any other ecosystem. So they won’t.

We said that a few times, first it was the harddisk factories flooded in Thailand IIRC, then it was GPUs for crypto, now it’s this shit. Not much bursting, more like a chain of bubbles.

I’m somewhat hopeful, in the last ten years, new and renovated country roads have been getting dedicated bike lanes behind the guardrails. Miles away from the excellent, completely separate infrastructure the dutch have, but its a start.

Living in the boonies, I’m never going to get a bus going by every ten minutes so a solid market for good EVs is still what I root for.

Eh, ID7 and A6 are getting there. BMW i4 ain’t bad either.

On some level, water would work the same way. If you were to collect water from somewhere, feed it into a pump and hook that up to your kitchen faucet, as soon as you increased pressure a little above that of the public water pipe, water would flow backwards from your faucet through the pipes in the house into the public water supply and your water meter might run backwards, depending on its construction.

disclaimer: Unlike freshly harvested AC electricity from a solar inverter, home collected water does not meet the hygiene standards for public supply. Absolutely do not do that either.

Huh, the wiring just supports power spontaneously coming from an exit point rather than an entry? Is that commonplace?

Why wouldn’t it? Electrical wiring isn’t a one way road, electricity (this is an extreme oversimplification, especially when it comes to AC) will always flow from points of high voltage to points of lower voltage. That’s how solar inverters feed into the grid. Raise their voltage a tad bit higher than the grid and match the frequency and phase of the grid until the outflow matches their maximum available power.

Is that commonplace?

That is a hard question, because this isn’t a feature, it’s how things are. Only thing one needs to take care of is that the solar inverter doesn’t deliver so much power that the circuit can consume beyond the circuit breakers capacity, otherwise the breaker would be rendered useless. That’s why these small plug inverters are limited to 800W in Germany, that puts the entire possible load on a 16A circuit into the general upper limit that is still within the safety margin fro 16A circuits.

EDIT: Now before someone gets the bright idea to connect their diesel generator to the grid this way: Don’t. It will not be in sync or phase and that will make something spectacular happen, but it will not supply the grid. Either have an expensive generator that is able to sync to the grid or have a grid disconnect and switchover in front of your generator plugin socket.

EDITEDIT: Also please never connect an island capable solar inverter to a plug. The ones described above are safe that way, because they wait for grid voltage to be available before they do anything, so there will never be high voltage on the open plug. An island capable solar inverter does by definition not do that. There will be high voltage on the plug and it will kill you and it will hurt like a fucker the entire time you’re dying.

It detects a voltage connected to the plug and starts feeding with slightly higher voltage, done.

These are really common in Germany, even being sold as sets at supermarkets occasionally.

As long as you have one of the old Ferraris style meters, it just runs backwards, these usually pay for themselves in about three years on a sunny balcony that way.